Musician, composer, artist and storyteller Carla Kihlstedt‘s Necessary Monsters is a staged song cycle after Jorge Luis Borges’ Book of Imaginary Beings. Carla wrote it with poet Rafael Osés for seven musicians and an actress. The narrative “follows a young writer as she tries in vain to corral the imaginary beings that parade out of her mind in the course of a sleepless night. In this journey, she encounters many beasts – some meddlesome, some winsome, some loathsome – and discovers that she is indeed the sum of their parts.”

Previous stagings of this work have provided stunning, intimate portraits of Carla and her colleagues’ creative processes– their intelligence, their playfulness, their sweetness. Since that time, the piece “has gone through a kind of distillation process, the way a good friendship does, that only happens with time. In this next chapter, we’ve recast, retooled, and redirected. The cast, the crew and the design team include some of my very favorite musicians and artists, all of whom have brought incredible ideas and energy to the piece. It is finally becoming the beast it was meant to be. We’re performing it in San Francisco at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts on July 29th and 30th of this year. ”

As of this minute, hundreds of people have contributed approximately $23K toward Carla’s Kickstarter campaign. She just sent out an email saying “We’re right at the edge and the pressure’s on. We’ve got three days to raise another $2,043. So, If you’ve been waiting in the wings for these last giddy moments… NOW is your time!”